Next week may see one of the most defining moments in relations between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia since the break-up of the Soviet Union.

On Wednesday, representatives from NATO, its 30 member states, and the Russian Federation will meet in Brussels, primarily to discuss the recent military buildup of Russian troops on the border between Russia and Ukraine. US and Russian diplomats will meet in Geneva Monday to discuss the crisis as well.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said there are "two paths," and that the option of "diplomacy and de-escalation" was one of two the US and international community had laid out for Moscow ahead of the meetings.
Blinken met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Stockholm, Sweden in December amid growing concern among Western powers that Russia was seeking to invade Ukraine.
The recent escalation in tension has sparked fears of a repeat of 2014, when Russia forcibly annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. This act, the fact that Russia was able to do it and get away with it, triggered years of serious conversations in policy circles about the role of the West and whether or not it was capable of standing up to Russia.
Relations between the West and Russia never rebounded after that point -- instead, almost reaching Cold War-level lows. The NATO-Russia Council, founded in 2002 as a talking shop for cooperation between the West and Russia, has not met in over two years.
Blinken said Friday that progress could be made during next week's diplomatic talks between US, European and Russian officials, but that it had to be a "two-way street" with Russia deescalating its aggression toward Ukraine.
While multiple NATO officials told CNN that, in their view, the fact that Russia has finally agreed to meet is a major concession and a sign that diplomacy could lead to a deescalation, they are also cautious that an increasingly hostile Kremlin might not be meeting in good faith.
It was only last month that Moscow published two draft agreements outlining its demands for defusing tensions on the Ukrainian border. Those demands include rolling back NATO deployments in Eastern Europe to some point in the 1990s, meaning many countries that neighbor Russia and were under the control of the Soviet Union would be less protected by the alliance.

This, along with a promise of NATO not expanding further east, is an unacceptable demand and a non-starter from NATO's perspective.
So what are the Russians hoping for?
NATO sources say that the demands could be "deliberately ridiculous to force a rollback on things like admitting new NATO members, pulling the likes of Ukraine and Finland from the mix," or could simply be "a performance that allows Russian officials to say they tried to negotiate in order to justify an escalation to their citizens."
Given both sides inflexibility, what is the point of the meeting?
According to officials from the most vocal and oldest NATO members, Wednesday is an opportunity for the alliance to lay down firmly and unified position: If Russia does escalate tensions, it will face "serious economic consequences. We will use tools that weren't deployed in  2014." 
Officials who spoke to CNN were not forthcoming on what those tools would be because "signposting them would give Russia the opportunity to prepare for them, defeating the purpose," however it's fair to say that they would be a mixture of hard economic sanctions and even more NATO on Russia's doorstep.
Risky as Western hostility might be in providing Putin, inaction could be worse. "Capitulating to out-of-this-world demands would make overall situation much more dangerous, as it would just embolden Kremlin to act aggressively," says Pasi Eronen, research analyst at the Conflict Studies Research Centre. "Moreover, China and other revisionists are watching the reaction to a Kremlin gamble."
What is notable when talking to officials and experts now is a sense that the West is far less scared of Russia than it has been in recent years. Poisonings and assassination of Russian citizens on foreign soil, brutal suppression and imprisonment of political opponents, interference in foreign elections and the annexation of Crimea have all painted an image of a Putin as a strong leader who must be feared.

In this image provided by The White House, President Joe Biden speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone from his private residence in Wilmington, Del., Thursday, Dec. 30, 2021.
Naturally, if you live in Russia or a neighboring nation and have opposed Putin, then he is a scary individual. However, his escalating aggression might be in part down to his diminished power in other areas.
"Putin is an aging autocrat, obsessed with the legacy of his rule, and that of the failure of Soviet Union," says Eronen. "Russia has been ravaged by Covid-19, and the future of its hydrocarbon export economy looks bleak."
This economic weakness is where the West, if it remains united, may possibly be able to force Putin's hand.
"His country has an economy roughly the same size as New York. If the West properly coordinated economic sanctions against him and against Russian business without fear, he would be backed into a corner very quickly," says Bill Browder, a prominent American-born financier who has led the whose push for the Magnitsky Act sanctions has infuriated the Kremlin.
While the West has imposed sanctions on Russia in recent years for various Kremlin misdeeds, it's fair to say they could have gone further.
That's partly why next week is so important: if NATO allies do all get on the same page, it could send the strongest possible message at a critical moment. Just as Putin tries to push his luck again, the West has the opportunity to say in a formal diplomatic setting that it's run out of patience.
In order to make any new sanctions more effective than previous attempts to punish Russia, the West must be prepared to suffer some pain. In the past, it has avoided targeting Russian sovereign debt and the energy trade.
According to Richard Connolly, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, "raising the costs of doing business for Russian firms, either by restricting access to capital, or by restrictions to accessing technologies," could have a bigger impact on the Russian economy and the Putin's inner circle than targeting individuals because "most critical Russian business is in some way connected to Kremlin."

He also says that "imposing secondary sanctions on those that trade with Russia" in things like energy, arms and strategic goods could do similar levels of harm that secondary sanctions have done to Iran.
On the thornier question of traditional hard power and the potential expansion of NATO, some believe that the allies have reason to feel bullish when they meet with the Russians on Wednesday
"We need to join forces and not be afraid. Putin is afraid -- not us. He is afraid of his own people, afraid of democratic elections," says Rasa Juknevičienė, Lithuania's former defense minister. She believes that now is the time to accelerate Ukraine's accession to NATO.
"Europe cannot return to the times of Hitler and Stalin, when nations were divided. Ukrainians, not Kremlin, have to decide, what will be the future of Ukraine. The success of Ukraine would be the best remedy against the Kremlin. They fear it most," she adds.
Obviously, talks next week will be tense and solving the Ukrainian crisis is not going to be easy. Putin can be at his most dangerous when backed into a corner, observers say, and he is currently juggling multiple foreign-policy crises after Russian troops were deployed to neighboring Kazakhstan to quell unrest following violent anti-government protests. A running theme over the past few years has been Putin leaping on Western errors in judgment -- from the Afghanistan withdrawal to inaction in Syria -- and using whatever power he has to bolster his reputation as a powerful leader.
And as multiple NATO officials conceded, Putin cares about Ukraine a lot more than many in the West and will have limitless patience to get what he wants if he senses weakness in the West.
The West goes into next week with so many strategic advantages over Russia, it should on paper be relatively to force Putin's hand toward deescalation in the east of Europe. However, Putin hasn't remained in power for over 20 years for no reason.
If the West is to successfully leverage its position as this critical moment and cut Putin down to size, its unity must be uncrackable. A repeat of the mistakes of 2014 could create an even more dangerous version of the Russian leader if he is able to stare down the most powerful alliance on earth.

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For drivers in western Kazakhstan, it was not a happy new year when January 1 brought a doubling in the price of liquid petroleum gas.

Only a few dozen people took to the streets in the city of Zhanaozen to protest, but within three days their anger was echoed by people across the vast resource-rich central Asian state, fed up with everything from unemployment and inflation to corruption.
The security forces had the upper hand to begin with, vastly outnumbering those who braved arrest and sub-zero temperatures to protest. But by January 4, spontaneous unrest had engulfed Almaty, the largest city in this authoritarian former Soviet state. The government's promises to roll back the price increase and offer other economic support were too little and too late.
Now President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who took office in 2019, faces the choice of offering real political dialogue or opting for repression.

Tokayev appears to have been caught off-guard by the rapid spread of the protests. On January 2 he tweeted that "citizens have the right to make public demands to local and central authorities, but this must be done in accordance with the law." Later he said that "demonstrators must be responsible and ready for dialogue," and promised that a commission would "find a mutually acceptable solution to the problem that has arisen in the interests of stability."
But the responses to Tokayev exposed the depth of popular anger. One said: "Every day everything rises in price. I mean groceries and everything else. Impossibly getting more expensive. Please take some action. It's not easy for ordinary people."
Pressure cooker of grievances
The government's repeated -- and unfulfilled -- pledges of a better economic future have turned Kazakhstan into a pressure cooker of discontent, analysts told CNN. Longstanding grievances about unemployment and low wages -- especially in the heavy industries of western Kazakhstan -- have been turbocharged by a pandemic-induced recession and grotesque inequality.
"This is a government that is highly detached from the reality of what happens on the ground. It's a country where there are no institutions through which to protest; the only route is on the streets," Paul Stronski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told CNN.
Stronski says authorities have announced many different plans to improve life and crack down on corruption but they are never implemented. "People have been told things will get better but wealth is siphoned off," he said.
The lack of dialogue and the harassment of political opposition has left the government detached from and blind to popular grievances.

Protests in Kazakhstan are far from unknown. But they've rarely brought about change. Katie Putz of The Diplomat magazine tweeted that "the protests in 2016 and 2019 in KZ were precursors and, for the authorities, missed off-ramps."
Stronski told CNN that authorities have missed both opportunities and warning signs over the past decade, he says, opting for cosmetic over real change.
It's not just bread-and-butter issues that have fired up protest. Increasingly, according to Diana Kudaibergenova of Cambridge University, economic and political grievances have coalesced -- driven by endemic corruption and resentment towards an elite seen as stashing billions of dollars in offshore havens.
Marie Struthers of Amnesty International says there's been no outlet for this quiet fury that has gathered pace. "For years, the government has relentlessly persecuted peaceful dissent, leaving the Kazakhstani people in a state of agitation and despair," she wrote Wednesday.

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Hong Kong has confirmed its first Omicron cluster, bringing an end to its long streak of zero locally transmitted cases and prompting fears of a wider outbreak as the city prepares to ring in the new year.

Two cases of local transmission were detected on Thursday -- a 76-year-old and a 34-year-old, both fully vaccinated with no recent travel history. They tested preliminarily positive for Covid-19 after eating at a restaurant on Monday, where they were exposed to an air crew member who was later confirmed to be carrying the highly transmissible Omicron variant, authorities say.
The crew member, an employee of Cathay Pacific, the city's flagship carrier, arrived in Hong Kong from the United States on Christmas Day. He had tested negative twice, before testing preliminarily positive for Omicron on Tuesday. He is fully vaccinated with a third booster shot of the Pfizer vaccine and remains asymptomatic, according to the Department of Health.
Health authorities announced Friday they are also monitoring 19 new cases, mostly imported and all suspected to be Omicron -- including a cargo pilot who visited several popular restaurants and bars on Monday, just days after returning from the US. On Tuesday he was determined to be a close contact of another patient and sent to the government's quarantine center; by Wednesday, he had tested positive for the virus.
Hong Kong hasn't seen a locally transmitted Covid case with an unknown source for nearly three months; the last such reported case was on October 8. Though the city had reported a number of imported Omicron cases from quarantined overseas travelers in December, the variant hadn't broken to the local community until now.

"There are now imported cases that found their way into the community, leading to a cluster of infections. This latest development is extremely worrying," said Sophia Chan, the Secretary for Food and Health, in a news conference on Friday.
She added that authorities were now preparing for an impending fifth wave, and urged the public not to congregate in crowded areas for New Year celebrations. "The next two weeks will be a crucial period to keep out Omicron. This is really critical," she said.
On Thursday night, authorities locked down the residential buildings where the 76-year-old and 34-year-old lived, and launched a mass testing campaign for anybody who had recently visited the premises. The testing covers 60 other premises across the city, with residents only allowed to leave "restricted areas" after presenting proof of a negative test result.
The restaurant where the two patients dined has also been closed for cleaning, disinfecting and other measures to improve airflow, said the Center of Health Protection.
"The government has remained vigilant and has been closely monitoring the latest scientific data on mutant strains as well as the epidemic situation of various places," said a CHP spokesperson in a statement. "The most stringent anti-epidemic measures will be implemented to prevent the mutant strain from spreading in the local community."
Hong Kong is one of the few places around the world still using a zero-Covid approach -- meaning it aims to stamp out all Covid cases within its borders. To that end, the city has one of the world's strictest border control and quarantine programs. This week, as the threat of Omicron loomed, authorities tightened quarantine restrictions further for air crew -- prompting Cathay Pacific to cancel a number of passenger flights to and from Hong Kong through the first quarter of 2022, and suspend long haul cargo flights into the city for one week.

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But the sustainability of this approach has been called into question in recent months, with several other places such as Australia and New Zealand abandoning the zero-Covid model in favor of "living with Covid." In mainland China, the world's largest zero-Covid holdout, increasingly frequent and widespread outbreaks have challenged the approach -- as do Hong Kong's latest cases.

Hong Kong's vaccination rate has lagged behind other developed nations, with less than 70% of the population fully vaccinated so far. All year, authorities have struggled to encourage higher vaccination rates -- particularly among the reluctant elderly, the most vulnerable population.
"We have to prepare for the worst because we don't actually know how many got infected in the end because of this case," said Leo Poon, head of Hong Kong University's Public Health Laboratory Sciences division, on Friday. "Omicron is spreading all around the globe, in Europe, in the Americas, and and also probably sometime in the future in Asia."
He added that the zero-Covid strategy was still viable for now because Hong Kong only has a few cases. The last few months of no local cases proves that "the screening mechanism here is quite effective," he said.
However, it's a trade-off, he said -- tighter restrictions might prevent Covid from entering the city, but at the cost of heavily disrupting the economy, flow of goods, people's ability to travel, and other aspects of daily life. And, he added, "now that we just come up with a more challenging (variant), that means we may have to fine tune our control policy."